this banging with fire
by mako-lies
Summary: Kevin teaches Sam to play the cello. As it turns out, ghosts don't necessarily make the best teachers. (Alternate Season 10)
1. Chapter 1

Notes: Thanks to balder12 for betaing this for me.

Spoilers through 10.09. Title from Victor Hernández Cruz's "Latin & Soul."

This work contains: some mention of torture, and allusions to PTSD.

* * *

A soaring note draws Sam to the closed door of Kevin's old room. One hand on his gun, he pushes the door open to see a bow gliding over the strings of an ancient and player-less cello, while a sheet of music hovers beforeKevin's still-cluttered desk. The cello continues playing despite its audience. Sam can't find the name to the soft melancholic song, but then, classic rock is more his area of expertise. Or near enough. "Kevin?" Sam whispers.

The cello goes dead still, and the lights flicker before Kevin appears, sitting cross-legged on his desk, papers and books sticking out of his image at odd angles. "Hey. Sorry." The cello is laid flat. "Didn't mean to spook you," Kevinsays with a wry twist of his mouth.

There's a joke somewhere in there, but Sam can't make it.

"No. It's fine. I justdidn't know you played." Sam lets go of the gun, stepping into the dusty room. It's still covered in books and papers and dirty clothes that not even Linda, could bring herself to straighten. Sam grimaces—if he'd known Kevin were coming back to the bunker, he'd have at least dusted.

"Yeah." Kevin smiles, that faraway untouchable smile. "I played in middle school and high school. Part of being well-rounded, you know?" He pauses, a too-intense look through Sam. "I didn't appreciate it enough. But hindsight is 20/20, right? Anyway, it's harder without a body. Takes a lot more focus, sort of like you're the cello, not the player. I think I'm getting the hang of it, though."

Sam nods, gaze drawn to the cello. "It's amazing it works. Does it need anything?"

"Resin, mostly. The stuff I found with the cello is really crappy, so… A new bow, maybe. It's not that important." But Kevin says it distractedly, already turned for the door.

After discovering his brother's corpse vanished leaving only a nonsense-note, Sam had searched the whole bunker for anything that might explain something even-for-the-Winchesters weird. Sam had swung open the door to Kevin's room only when he couldn't put it off anymore. Sam crept into Kevin's room as if he might wake the kid, only to find a thick coating of old clothes and sheets of music and books and dust. In the corner, as Sam was sifting through books for some last inspiring grain of information from Kevin, he saw the old cello propped up, with its bow leaning against it. Finding nothing of actual use, Sam'd fled the scene of the crime.

The cello is gently laid out on the bed, beside the now-still bow. Kevin stands in the doorway, waiting for Sam to leave too, and papers crinkle obscenely in the silence as Sam steps on them with his clumsy tangible feet. "Could you teach me?" he asks, before Kevin can evaporate. Before Kevin is gone.

Kevin's fingers flicker as he flexes them. "To play the cello?" he asks, before considering Sam with that dark gaze of his. "I could, I guess. Why? Pretty sure you don't have to play an instrument to impersonate a fed. Or kill a ghost."

"Music was one of those things I wished I could do that I never got a chance to. Moving around all the time, and everything. Dad wouldn't let me play the trumpet when I asked." He tries to shrug it off, but Kevin's brows draw together, like Sam is the translucent one rather than Kevin. Sometimes, it's too easy to fool Kevin—despite everything, Kevin trusted—and sometimes, kid's more skeptical than anybody his age should be. Sam rubs at the bridge of his nose.

A pause as the lights falter again. Then Kevin shrugs. "Sure. Just… later. I'm tired right now." As if to underscore how exhausting being dead is, Kevin disappears with truly impeccable timing.

* * *

Kevin doesn't show up for dinner, not that he needs to eat, so it's just Dean, Linda, and Sam gathered around thetable. Dinner's quiet except for the dip of spoons into the beef stew Dean made.

When Sam had picked up the call from her last week, he'd expected her to say that she'd sent Kevin on. Or he'd hoped, anyway, that there were people involved in this mess that didn't repeat and repeat the same mistakes heand Dean keep making. (They still haven't fixed the door Dean hacked through, and they might not. It's hard to fix something nobody can look at.)

"Mrs. Tran?" he'd answered.

"Sam? Hi," she said briskly, and the line crackled, and he wanted to reach through the phone and shake her till she broke and understood. "I need to come stay at the bunker. Not for very long, but neighbors are starting to ask questions about Kevin. It would be better for us to relocate for right now."

A canister of salt and some kerosene would be better. He sighed. "Are you sure—?"

"Absolutely. I wouldn't ask otherwise." That he could believe. She'd disconnected before he could warn her against coming. Before he could warn her about him and Dean.

When she arrived, black ring hanging heavy on a gold chain, Dean let her in with a twitch of a smile, because who could actually turn her away? Not with Crowley's shadow looming behind her. Not with Kevin curled tight into the ring, like a genie in a lamp. Linda took a room three doors away from where Kevin's room still stood empty, and Dean outlined all the reasons why poking around the bunker was dangerous while Linda didn't listen, opting instead to unpack her suitcase.

There was a weight to her movements that hadn't been there before, heavy like Lucifer's-whisper-in-his-head, heavy like three-and-a-half days without sleep.

Kevin materialized not long after, arms folded over his chest. "Hey," he said, nodding at Sam, then Dean. "I told her this was a horrible idea."

"Kevin, that's enough."

He flickered, expression flattened-out as he watched his mother; then he shrugged. Not arguing. That was a good sign, Sam figured. Linda drew herself up tall beneath the press of her son's silence, but her grip on her bag tightened. "I appreciate it," she told Sam curtly.

Did she blame them, for not keeping her son safe? For not coming for her earlier? Sam avoided her gaze. "No problem," said Dean, without that pretend, easy smile.

Sam breaks into the layers of dinner-silence with, "So Kevin played the cello?"

She pauses with her spoon midway to her mouth. A moment of deliberation, and then she lets her spoon clink into the bowl. "Yes." She nods, gaze piercing as she looks at Sam, and he struggles not to shift under her scrutiny, "He played for seven years, before all this." Linda waves her hand as she says all this.

The table rattles, and Linda turns her headexpectantly. But Kevin doesn't appear. Just reminds them that he can hear everything they say. It's hard to talk about a ghost like they're there, but rude to talk about them like they're not. Sam wipes his mouth, then pushes his bowl away. For a second, Dean looks like he's going to say somethingabout it, pick a fight like when they were kids, then he just turns back to his own food. "Was he any good?" asks Dean through his mouthful of stew.

Linda scoffs, reminding Dean that Kevin was good at everything; Sam contains his smile. But Dean can't leave it at that. "No, I mean, was he really good? Not good like Sam was in Our Town, but actually good?"

"Hey!" Sam protests at the unexpected jab from the not-quite-playful curl of his brother's mouth.

But Linda says, "Kevin played excellently." She pointedly lifts her spoon again. "That isn't bias talking."

Dean seems to accept it. Or decides he doesn't care, it's difficult to tell.

* * *

On their way home from the hunt, Sam tells Dean to stop. His brother blinks owlishly at the mid-sized town in that surprised way he takes in the world now that he's human again. "Gotta piss?" he asks, voice gravel-rough with extended silence.

Sam has always measured Dean's wellness in his noise. The worry paces like a tiger in the pit of Sam's stomach.

"I need to get something for Kevin." He points out the music shop, and Dean sighs, but he pulls off to the side, then cuts the engine. "Have at it." A pause. "I'll be here."

It's too much to pick apart, so Sam heads into the shop on a mission for resin and a bow for Kevin, and hands over this month's card. Will the cello help Kevin? Can anything but fire help Kevin? Not that it's Sam's choice. It can't be, after everything.

Sam doesn't fool himself, but is glad when Dean doesn't ask about the bag. It's not often Sam has answers anymore, and this rings of too-little-too-late.

* * *

But, somehow, Dean still seems to have answers. Or he acts like he does. "We're gonna have to send him on." Dean drums his fingertips on the steering wheel, tongue darting over his chapped lips. "She's gotta know that."

Sam blows out a long breath, turns his gaze to the familiar wastes outside, flat and grey-yellow with sparse green. Rural Midwestern America. Maybe making an event of sending Kevin to Heaven will do them all some good, given the lone witness to Kevin's ash was Dean. Sam can see it—the fire, the encroaching darkness, the drawn lines on Dean's face shifting with the shadows of the eating flames.

From what Sam's heard from other hunters, the number of ghost-sightings has soared in the past year. And maybe every person that died when Heaven was shut, except for people going to Hell, is still trapped between worlds. Like Kevin is. The Veil gorged fat on the souls of everyone who happened to die at the wrong time.

He closes his hands into fists. It's too much to think about. Dean doesn't offer any other answers. Maybe he sees the fire, too.

* * *

The cello is at once too big and too small for Sam's hold of it. And, as it turns out, it's a great thing Kevin wasn't intending on becoming a teacher—because he's a terrible one. Not that Sam is a good student. The cello was never high in Sam's lists of interests and he's clumsy with it. Sam adjusts his grip on the bow for the fifth time, before Kevin heaves a gargantuan sigh for someone that doesn't actually breathe. "Okay… Just work with that." He plucks one of the strings critically from across the room. "So we'll start with a scale. That should be easy enough."

Sam bites back a theatrical sigh of his own as Kevin reappears behind Sam. "Remember, this is A string," And his voice is soft now, retracted its claws, and Sam wonders who taught Kevin, even as he puts bow to string, fingers pressing tightly where Kevin arranged them.

The instrument screeches harsh, and the lights whine in sympathy. Kevin says nothing, simply readjusts Sam's fingers on the fingerboard with a careless thought. "Maybe I should have taped it up. You know, so you'd know where to put your fingers." It rings of an apology, and Sam smiles, even as the pressure on his fingers increases enough his bones creak beneath the weight of Kevin's attention.

"What kind of tape?"

"Thin and colored." Kevin frowns, gaze on a bygone time that Sam has no part of. "Mom'll know."

Kevin shifts his focus back onto Sam, sharp and cutting, and Sam—Sam can't believe the tablets didn't vomit out all their secrets, quaking, at the intensity of that look. Another feeble, useless, awful, self-serving, vile apology bubbles like bile in his throat, and he swallows it down with all the others so it sits hot and aching in his gut. "Sam?" Kevin's voice penetrates Sam's skull. "Ready?"

"Yeah—" he tightens the rearranged grip.

(Kevin isn't the first or the last ghost to play this cello. Sam wonders who the last Man of Letters was to play this, before Kevin found and pressed life into it.)

Sam's second attempt isn't better than the first, his fingers huge on the slim neck, and he's strangling it, choking desperate whining sounds from it. Sam shuts his eyes, and he raises the bow off the strings.

"Everybody sucks at first," Kevin says kindly.

But not everyone has a teacher that's past their expiration date and on a timer. Sam twitches his face into an approximation of a smile, before Kevin is gone, the chill of the room lifting with his absence. Sam wants the cold back.

* * *

Youtube proves to be a better, if less personal, teacher than Kevin. For hours, Sam watches videos, then applies bow to instrument, wringing the life from the thing. Somewhere in the Veil, Kevin is scowling at Sam's violence, till Sam's eyes prickle with the disapproval, and his shoulder yowls, an unappeased wildcat. He sets the bow aside, then finds the cleaning cloth.

The strings scream grating as he wipes away the white dust; the hairs at Sam's nape raise up.

He's more on edge from a cello than a ghost.

Sam rubs his eyes. He settles in his chair, pulling his computer into his lap. Music reading—so exciting. Months ago, when Sam had opened the door to bear witness to the dust of Kevin's room, everything about the cluttered mess had seemed so familiar after the state of the houseboat, but the random sheets of music had been an unwelcome surprise—he hadn't know what to do with that, that tiny personal touch in a space otherwise devoted to work and research and Sam had rifled through it all—searching for that grain of knowledge before he'd finally left. Shaking.

Now the music stands out stark on his screen, but the silence is the same.

* * *

When Sam enters the main room, Linda stashes the worn leather book away like he can't read the twist of grief at the sharp edges of her mouth, like he doesn't know the blood-red, hot desperation in the tremor of her worn hands. Gone ragged under Crowley's care, and Sam wonders if she can read the guilt in the sag of his shoulders.

As she hides it away, he sees—glinting in handprinted gold letters, The Veil—and his stomach drops heavy and fast. He knows this, knows the clutching, the screaming takemeplease, but he pretends not to see the raw sorrow settled into every crevice of Linda Tran—and maybe he doesn't know. Never lost his child. Lost both parents, sure, but Sam thinks children are supposed to outlive their parents.

"Have you seen him today?" Linda asks him, clipped.

"Yeah. He uh—" Sam reads one of the notes she's written before she covers it with a hand. Phoenix tailfeather? "He wore himself out teaching me the cello."

Linda folds her notebook closed, and whatever she thinks of Kevin's teaching, nothing shows on her face. The research they all pretend she's not doing gets put away—and his gut tightens into a hard ball. She isn't the first Tran to do research in the bunker; she's just the wrong Tran.

Guiltily, he turns his gaze aside. (But he's not the only one that thinks she's the wrong Tran, is he? Somehow, it doesn't make him feel better.)

He sits down on Linda's left, so they don't have to stare at each other. Instead, he asks her, "Kevin said something about tape? For the cello?"

Linda hums thoughtfully, before she tells him, "I'll order it to one of your drop boxes. Just write the address out for me." The tape is for Kevin, but Sam puffs nearly to bursting with gratitude.

Tape is something like forgiveness, maybe, if he squints and tilts his head just right.

He looks to her just in time to watch her thin, brittle, breakable, formerly-broken fingers clasp the heavy dark ring on the glinting chain. The One Ring. He wishes, sharply, knife-to-the-lungs sharp, that Charlie were here. Sam isn't sure exactly what would be easier, but it would be easier. Maybe Charlie could get through to Linda, since Sam can't, because he's the one that murdered Kevin with a press of his palm. Linda clenches her hand tight and protective over the precious ring, Kevin's ring and his father's ring, a ghost ring.

"My husband," she tells him, sighting the object of his scrutiny, "died young, too. Hit by a car. Drunk college kids, when Kevin was a baby." Easy. Matter-of-fact.

A crash from the kitchen makes them both jump. Sam pulls out his gun, and Linda trembles, rabbit-scared, and whispers, "Well?"

And Sam creeps to the kitchen with Linda ghosting his footsteps.

Sam gently peeks around the doorway, finger comfortable on the trigger—to see Dean panting over a shattered casserole dish. The coffeepot beeps and screams when Kevin appears, barely visible, like looking at him through wax paper. His gaze is locked on Dean, and Kevin's face is twisted-ugly, before he sights his motherand the expressions sloughs off, to reveal the feverish smile he always forces her way. Like a pang of reassurance. He's fine, fine, okay, great (dead dead dead). Linda rushes to her son. "What happened?" she asks him.

In answer, the coffeepot shrills. Then, Kevin's gone and the appliances are once again silent. A relief. Sam's temples throb, and he doesn't stow his gun. Dean doesn't look up. Instead, he sits heavy in the broken glass and steaming food, trembling like an addict, and the Mark is puffy red. Sam swallows. Cain and Abel: he knows how this story plays out. "Dean?" Sam's voice comes out steadier than is possible.

"Sammy?" Dean slurs, finally, finally looking at Sam with watery red eyes. "I… it burned." He gestures with a bloody, torn-up hand at the steaming casserole splattered over the floor and inset with glass.

Linda's voice is almost calm when she commands, "Take your brother, Sam. I'll clean up."

Obeying is a relief that Sam doesn't think on. Dean comes docilely, treading so heavily that Sam keeps hands out to catch his brother. But Dean doesn't fall any further than he already has. They stop in the bathroom, to wash away the dripping blood and glass. Sam cleans out the wounds. The Mark doesn't scrub away, but Dean doesn'tstop Sam from trying, mouth open and eyes distantly tender. Eventually, Sam wraps the cuts and the Mark.

Dean grunts something like a thanks as Sam escorts his brother to his room, rather than the dungeon.

"I need to work, Sam," Dean says, finally, rubbing a white, bandaged hand over his mouth. "I just need to." And his eyes scrunch tightly shut, before opening—green-not-black.

Sam breathes out a long breath. "Yeah. We'll find something, Dean."

So so easy to say yes. Like always. But it's not a solution. Sam's gaze draws to the crisp white bandage where Brotherly Anger burns. Sam leaves Dean there, fleeing.


	2. Chapter 2

As Dean drives them back from a hunt, he never once reaches over to crank up the music. Sam watches the trees pass. Kansas is still a ways off, and so he settles back into the seat. Dean glances over at him, but his gaze stalls on the prop amulet hanging from the mirror.

Sam's stomach flips over and over, like it does whenever he looks at it. He forces a smile.

Maybe what Dean needs is a hobby—something constructive. When Sam had called Jody months ago to put out an alert on Dean, she'd told him to take care of himself, with that familiar, easy warmth she wears like soft flannel.

"And not just physically, Sam." A sharp reminder. "Everything else, too. A hobby that isn't researching or hunting might help. It… well, it's sorta helping Alex, when she's not—never mind. Anyway, she builds. If you want a birdhouse or four, you let me know."

A laugh erupted from him, a bright burst of light. "All right, Jody. I'll keep that in mind."

"Don't be a stranger, Sam. I'll let you know if I find anything on your brother." A threatening promise. He'd almost felt relieved.

Sam frowns out the window as the sun slides lower over the purple horizon. Playing the cello could be that for him, his birdhouse-building. And it might help Kevin, too—and Dean—?

He lays his head against the glass and closes his eyes.

* * *

Their breath rises as icy mist the moment they step into the bunker. Gooseflesh rises over Sam's skin like the drag of too-familiar fingers, and Dean reaches automatically for his gun. "Kevin!" Linda's voice splinters with ice. "That's enough!"

Sam and Dean barrel down the stairs to see Linda surrounded by fluttering sheets of paper, torn out from books and her notebook. In the center, she's trembling, tears frosty on her cheeks. Her son rips one last page from The Veil before he flickers out. Dean yanks Linda back as the pages finally land from their furious flight. "What happened?" he growls in his best Batman impersonation.

Linda pulls out of Dean's grip, but her lower lip trembles as if with cold. She bends to her upset work, gathering torn pages into her hands. "Kevin and I are fine," she tells them, tone coated sweet with honey. "It just is hard for him."

Like they don't understand how tough it is to be dead. Dean's expression goes dark and flat, eyes nearly black as he lifts up a page from Linda's notes—something about Flesh of the Blood?—and he crumples it up. He opens his mouth, to snarl out something, and Sam shakes his head at his brother. Dean drops the ball of paper; Linda makes a soft noise of outrage, picking up the ruined note.

Wordlessly, Dean stalks out. Sam lets out a breath that's wet and warm. "Linda—" he starts, then kneels to help her.

"Don't," she snaps, shuddering. "Don't."

She bows her head over the now empty covers of the book, and a tear drags slowly down her cheek before something invisible brushes it away. An apology that has her curling tighter in on herself.

What can Sam say that she doesn't already know? He leaves the pages in a neat stack, one sentence standing out:

Not much is known about the function of the Veil; however, those within the Veil are as lost children caught between two unreachable worlds.

Sam retreats to the kitchen, to wait out her grief.

* * *

The kitchen is more Dean's than Sam's, like most things. Sam scrounges up some pans and some thawed ground beef. There's a certain mindlessness to the sizzle-pop of the cooking meat, and he dumps too much garlic powder and salt onto it.

(On the counter, the coffeepot is silent and dusty.)

Sam finds penne and sauce. Good enough. Cooking is something he enjoyed at Stanford and Kermit. But there's something intimate about it that sets his teeth on edge here in the bunker. In so many ways, he wants that calm safety to be here in the bunker, but safety is hard to believe in the halls walked by a massacred people.

This bunker has housed the Wicked Witch, the King of Hell, a Hell Knight, the angel that caused the Fall, and now a momentarily-friendly ghost. If the bunker is home, they bring work home too frequently.

Sam stirs the meat.

Not long after, Linda slinks in. She finds a colander and offers it to him, and he takes it without drawing attention to her puffed up eyes and wet face. There's not much kindness left in him, but there's this.

"He wouldn't hurt anyone," she tells him, even and unflappable again.

Sam dumps the pasta into her peace-offering colander in a burst of steam. "Not yet," (maybe, he doesn't say). "Mrs. Tran, if he doesn't want to be brought back…"

"He's too young to know. What I do is my business," she snaps icily, and he uses all his energy not to flinch, so much he can't respond, throat all closed up, hands staying steady with desperate force of will. Linda is kind enough not to remind him he's to blame.

(Sam took control of his meat from Lucifer himself, and couldn't stop one lowly angel from burning Kevin out.)

No one eats the pasta that night. It sits unappealing and unwanted in the fridge.

* * *

In his room, Sam sprawls flat on his bed, gaze on the ceiling. It's dark and the bunker needs better heating if it's going to house an actually real ghost, rather than ghostly memories.

Sam barely hears a series of thumps from Dean's room. He shuts his eyes, pretending not to hear.

Maybe Dean won't break anything he'll miss. Then again, Dean's attachment to anything seems to fluctuate with every breath he draws. At least the Impala's clean now. That, at least, remains the same.

Sam curls under the blankets, insulating himself from the noise like he did when he was eleven and Dean brought home a young couple to—and no matter how loudly he breathed, he couldn't drown out the giggling, the grunting, the screech of the bed. Another crash sounds from Dean's room, clear as if through headphones, and Sam can picture the angry red Mark so easily, can't forget the bug-black eyes, glinting, and Sam rolls onto his stomach, closes his hand over the smooth grip of his gun.

It's heavy and empty in his palm. A gun can't protect him. But false security is something Sam's intimately familiar with. It's better than nothing.

When he sleeps, he sees black eyes and burnt out sockets.

* * *

Holed away in his room, Sam avoids Dean and Linda both. Avoids Dean's blurry, stubble-stained face and the Cain that simmers beneath his Marked skin; avoids Linda's sharpening desperation as she glues her notebook together, page by page. He lifts the cello just as his breath freezes.

Sam tenses, pain coiled tight in his shoulder. Ready to spring.

But Kevin only offers up the bow, eyes wide and smiling—bright, young, an expression Sam doesn't remember on Kevin's face, but hopes he can keep. "Let's try this again," Kevin chirps, as Sam's fingers close around the flimsy wood.

Sam rubs resin into the hair, as Kevin praises him for remembering; Sam takes four tries to recall the scale, but every few seconds, Kevin interrupts to tell Sam how great he's doing. And all the praise settles warm and abrasive in his chest, where Sam can't avoid it, but Kevin's smile would likely hurt if Kevin could feel pain anymore. A pang, as Sam sees—again, again—the smoking holes in Kevin's skull, an overlay to Kevin's translucence. "Sam?" Kevin's voice is still too-bright, jarring in the frosty room. "Hey. Do you need me to explain it again?"

When Sam nods, Kevin repeats himself with a patience Sam's never seen in either Tran. But the desperation is familiar.

The scale comes easier this time, still screeching, but not screaming, and he loosens his grip, supporting instead of strangling. Kevin shows his teeth as he smiles. But the effort rubs Kevin away again, until the room gain degrees and Sam finds himself wet with sweat.

* * *

Eventually Sam sets aside the instrument. He can't hide here forever; if he's learned nothing else, he's learned that.

Linda turns when Sam enters the kitchen, un-slumping like someone's pulled taut at her puppet strings. "Sam," she greets, and without asking she fills him an extra bowl of salad. "Dean is working on that car. He'll be in soon." She presents the information with ease, like reading off a weather report—as if it has no meaning for her. Maybe it doesn't. They're just a stop on the way to restoring her son, and everyone can see it clear as her neat handwriting.

"Thanks," he says as he takes the salad.

They settle around her research, which she doesn't bother to hide. Not that Sam can bring himself to really look at the carefully smoothed and taped pages. The Tran family isn't the first they've failed.

Dean enters in a beat-up, oily T-shirt. He smears black from his hands to his face, his mouth puckered in consideration. His Mark is wrapped up with white bandages: out of sight, out of mind. "Mrs. Tran." He leans against the doorway, like it will make him less threatening. "You know what you gotta do. I don't like it any more than you do, but—"

"We have time," she says, so simply, always a problem-solver, driven and—would she shudder and stop without a goal? Would the scars left by Crowley go rigid, make it impossible to move?

He can see some of the ridged places that Crowley carved out, and he knows what it's like to endure endlessly in the hopes of one person. But Dean was here, after. More or less. Kevin is and isn't. When Dean looks to Sam for reassurance, Sam can only clench his jaw.

Dean blows out an annoyed breath. Sam knows he's the pain-in-the-ass little brother as Dean growls at Linda in something like his demon voice, "Not much. We do this for a living. He's getting dangerous, kid or not. Come on, Mrs. Tran. He should be kicking back Upstairs, and you should go home. Do some yoga or PT or whatever. Order strippers."

She stiffens under his attempt at decency, that slick ready-made smile he slides into when he's hiding from something larger than his feelings. "Do not patronize me." Her mouth trembles, a flash of something so furious Dean's lucky he's the one with the gun. "I know my son, and I know what he needs. I don't presume to tell you how to take care of Sam—do me the same courtesy."

Linda stabs her fork into a few spinach leaves, as if she can puncture Dean's skin and release all the hot air. Dean huffs as Sam folds in over his own food, and Dean takes a step closer. Sam tightens his grip white-knuckled on his fork, but the lights flicker—Dean stills.

She looks to the ceiling, then to the switch, like she'll see her five-year-old son flicking it off and on, the best game ever invented. Lights-on, lights-off. But he isn't there. Or they can't see him.

Maybe Kevin doesn't like being talked about like he's not here either.

"Mrs. Tran," Sam says, keeping his hands where she can see them. "You've got to think about it. Just think about it."

Dean interrupts. "The anger builds and builds, and sometimes he might be able to control it—but that doesn't mean it's not there. Every day, it gets worse. Till it takes nothing to set him off. He's gonna hurt, and maybe kill, someone. He won't be able to stop himself. That's just the name of the game, Mrs. Tran. And trust me when I say, you don't want that for him. He's gonna to hate himself for it later. Even if you can save him." Dean's voice is low, scraped raw over the teeth of the First Blade, red with Cain's brand.

Sam shudders at what might be the chill in the room as Dean refuses to look at him.

"I'm through talking about this. It isn't up for discussion," Linda tells him crisply. "If you'd like us to leave, we will."

Rather than respond, Dean stalks out. Hopefully to take a cold shower. Sam exits not long after. He cleans out his bowl before he slinks back to his bedroom and the cello.

* * *

Sam settles at the foot of his bed, cleaning the instrument between his knees. He plays the scale over and over, repetitive, till it comes out almost right, and his shoulder complains, and—finally—his eyelids tug heavy, and he lays the cello flat, and flops over on his bed, blinking up at the bright light.

It gets flicked off, before Sam can rise to turn it off. It stays off, no game of Kevin's. Sam falls asleep. Finally.


	3. Chapter 3

Kevin's laugh echoes in Sam's room. It might be the first time someone's laughed in here; Sam isn't sure. "You're fluent in Latin, but you can't read music? Seriously?" Kevin tries to bite back another laugh, maybe to spare Sam's feelings, but Sam smiles at him—reassuring, because his laughter is a relief in this concrete home of memories.

"I've practiced Latin," Sam points out, undefensively, and he watches Kevin rather than the music notes.

Sam clasps the instrument loosely, attention not on the elegant, aged wood. But the cello feels nice in his grip, almost warm. Or, maybe he's warm because he's taken to wearing more layers as the temperature sinks and sinks till Sam's teeth chatter and his playing becomes even more abysmal.

"I guess you can't be good at everything right away," Kevin admits. "You'll get it, though. Soon, you won't need my help at all."

Nobody is fooling anybody about the transience of this arrangement, but Sam still clenches the bow in a violent grip. "For now, what's this note, Kevin?

And Kevin lays it out for him the same way he talks about a spell he's researched or found in the tablet, with an easy brilliance that might have attracted God to him in the first place. What did God look for in a Word Keeper anyway? Intellect? Persistence? Humanity? Was it a lottery system?

A lottery and a death sentence, with Grace rather than stones.

Kevin says, "I found you an easy song. I had to go search the bunker again, but I found it. It's probably a good place to start. You'll get it." And Sam smiles at the encouragement that's not gilded praise painted over fury.

Or, at least, it's not obvious.

When Sam plays it first, it comes out a shrieking mournful wail, a dirge no one wanted, but Kevin waits and waits, and Sam won't let him down again. Again and again, till it's something smooth rather than cutting, translucent and easy, and Kevin's smile is soft enough Sam wonders what memories it brings up for him.

Kevin doesn't tell him. Instead, he claps a hollow clap when Sam makes it through the song with only a few mistakes. Mistakes that aren't jarring enough that the lights flicker. But then Kevin is gone without a word, and Sam's alone with a cello and muted triumph.

* * *

His fingers curl around the screwdriver easily. Fixing the furnace in the bunker is more challenging than in the hotel what feels an age ago. At least Sam can avoid hammers.

He relaxes into the work, into the simplicity of demands that revolve around does-it-work-or-doesn't-it? If he fixes the heating system, they can crank up the temperature so they're a little less frosty, except for when Kevin actually appears. And his breath comes out even, sure, and maybe there's research to do, and a cello to play, and hunts to find—but not right now. He twists a screw into the console.

Sam tests the system, and hears an answering rumble in the bunker.

He grins down at his work, setting aside his tools. Feels warm and like he can try the cello again without ruining anything. When he stows the screwdriver away, the hammer stares Sam down, but he clings to his ease, a brittle fragile barrier, and he slams the drawer shut before the memories can take residence in the hotfearful twist of his stomach.

* * *

Join the mobile infantry and save the world , it begins, and Sam reaches into the KFC bucket, grease hot and comforting on his fingers. Thanksgiving Dinner. Dean had chosen the food, going with something familiar rather than ornate. Even for their guests, such as they are, and Sam keeps his questions down with honey and crumbs. Sam chose the activity, movie-watching. It was a safe bet considering the audience to their holiday ritual. He can feel the sear of Kevin's judgment, whiplike and vicious, even as Kevin hovers the bucket an inch above his lap so everyone can reach.

Linda had chosen the movie. Or, rather, Kevin had under the guise of his mother's choice. Nobody says anything about it. It isn't often actual ghosts haunt holidays.

Sam tears the skin off first, till the thigh is bared for him, steaming and smooth. The first Thanksgiving he recalls is when he was five, and he'd asked Dad why the bucket and not the stuffed turkey. Dad had scuffed a greasy hand over his pepper stubble, all slow and heavy, while Dean groaned that soft groan that meant Sam was an-NOY-ing. "If you're not hungry," Dad told the dingy carpet beneath Sam's feet, "give it to your brother."

Hungry Sammy had given his leg to his brother, but guiltily kept the butter biscuit.

Later, much later, his first actually real Thanksgiving would have stuffed turkey and gravy and potatoes and and and. All without buckets. The imprint of it in Heaven though—

Sam glances over the Tran family at his brother, who's ripping hunks of chicken off with his teeth, grease slick on the beginning of the bed, Sam, then Linda, then the bucket and Kevin, and finally Dean. Linda's mouth is pursed as she idly fingers her chicken leg, grease staining her fingertips. Sam and Dean keep talking about converting this extra room into a living space, but here they still are: computer on Linda's lap and all of them sitting at the foot of the bed.

His stomach drops out. When did the Trans last have Thanksgiving? (Hell, when did Sam and Dean celebrate anything last?) And he suddenly wishes they'd sprung for a turkey and a couch, or something. Anything. Because surely everyone knows this is going to be the last? Sam looks at Dean, wishes for turkey and instead hands his thigh to his brother.

* * *

As the bugs keep on coming, Sam glances over to see Linda reach for her son's hand, only to pass through partway. Her fingers meet against something solid enough, some thought of Kevin's, maybe, and she clenches white-knuckled around the memory of her son's hand.

The bucket of picked-clean carcasses wavers with his multi-tasking, but doesn't fall.

Kevin notices Sam looking, and he smiles that happytoobright smile, the painful one, and Sam wants to ruffle Kevin's hair, like it can make something better. Linda lays her head on her son's shoulder, and her forehead passes through an inch of it before Kevin catches her, eyes scrunched shut in concentration, smile evaporated.

Not long after, her breathing smoothes out softly. Sleep drags her under, round and soft, the first time he's seen her relaxed since she got her anti-possession tattoo that didn't protect her from anything. Over her head, Dean meets Sam's gaze, some shark smile on his brother's butter-wet lips. Sam smiles an almost-smile back—just another happy holiday with his brother, isn't it?

Between the brothers, Kevin's eyes are only for his mother.

His face pinches up ratlike, and he wraps both arms around her, protectively clinging, but Sam can see him start to blur out. And Kevin shakes his head as his form buckles.

Linda falls into the empty space her son formerly inhabited and crashes into the upturned bucket of bones. She gasps in surprise, jolting upright away from the bucket, and she laughs when she finally sees it for what it is, sounding brittle and uneasy. Sam forces a smile for her, while Dean hands her the last biscuit.

This isn't a simulation anymore.

* * *

Thanksgiving fades Kevin enough that Sam's left to his own fumbling with the cello. He leaves the door to his room open for a ghost, and sometimes, when he hits a particularly wailing register, Linda leans in Sam's doorway with her arms folded over her chest. She watches him play as he clutches at dignity, brilliant red under her scrutiny.

She doesn't have to say he's nowhere near as good as Kevin.

* * *

At the time of night where Sam's grip on his gun usually slackens with sleep, a crash not from Dean's room pulls him up gun first. He follows the echoing mishmash of shouts with his gun stowed safely in his waistband, to find Linda already creeping.

"How many apologies do you fucking want?" Dean's growl, as the coffeepot rings like a fire-bell. "Newsflash: you're not the first friend I've—"

Kevin cuts through Dean's defense like it's made of skin, leaving it dripping red. "I don't want your shitty apologies. Honestly, Hell'd be better than your self-flagellating pity fest."

"Careful what you wish for," Dean tells him, eyes nearly fever-bright. Maybe he can already see Kevin strung up, a slim flame roasting off that first blistering layer of skin, the salty-wet tears steaming off his face while Lucifer—no, no Crowley, while Crowley laughs.

Sam cradles Linda back, away from where her son advances on Dean; Kevin's got a prowl to his step Sam's never seen in the kid, but Kevin's been prey before, ripped up and spit out for the scavengers to pick apart, bit by bit. Maybe he's learned by imitation. Kevin stands before Dean like he's tall. "Come on, that supposed to scare me? You're losing it. We can all see it. But what's it matter, right?" Kevin laughs, a short pushed-out sound that silences the coffeepot. "As long as you can bury your head in the sand and pretend like things between you and Sam are great."

Blood flushes Dean's cheeks; his fingers twitch over a missing denied hilt. "You don't know shit," he growls out, all red and black. "You don't know shit about me 'n Sam."

"Want to hug, do some sharing and caring? What, since I'm family and all," the word spat out like frothyhot demon blood.

Dean presses large as life into Kevin's notspace. In Sam's hands, Linda surges forward as far as his cage will let her. You don't get between Godzilla and Mothra. You get the hell out of the way. "Kid," Dean quivers, all puffed up, "I'm warning you—"

"What are you going to do, bring a dangerous angel into my home, not tell me about it, and—hold on, it's all coming back to me." The row of neat coffee cups shatter to white and red shards. Sam yanks Linda further back as thin cuts drip blood down Dean's face, and Kevin ripples with the effort.

"Why don't you go hide in your closet, kid? Think you shoulda stayed in there, like every other time we needed you," Dean delivers it with that smug twist of his lip he only uses when he knows he's won.

Kevin breaks Dean's favorite pair of bowls before he flickers out with an outraged expression. He doesn't even get the last word. He just goes.

In the swollen silence that follows, Dean turns to Linda's bright glare trembling beneath Sam's hands. To be safe, Sam keeps holding her. But Dean walks out with that clipped step that reminds Sam of Dad. Dean's door is slammed shut, and it would take a hammer to follow him.

Linda struggles away from Sam, and Sam lets her go. "Kevin?" she calls.

But her son doesn't answer. And Sam doesn't stay to watch her look. He curls under his blankets, the metal of his gun cool beneath his fingertips where Linda was hot.

* * *

The next morning, Dean's eyes have that apologetic, needtohunt gleam. But they're green under the not-flickering fluorescents, and Linda's anger is a house of vengeful spirits, clawing at the walls of their bunker. The narrow look with flaring nostrils she gives Sam is better than the purple black imprint of his hands on her skin.

Her floral, short-sleeved shirt is aimed at him. The bruises fresh over less-fresh scars, and the old shiny burn where Crowley stripped her bare.

So Sam says, "Let's work." And Dean's keys are already dangling from his brother's fingertips.

* * *

Dean's music howls while they fly down the road. His grip so tight on the wheel that his veins puff out of his arm, blue and straining. Scars break up the expanse of his skin. When Sam was a kid he used to sit and count all of Dean's scars, giggling uneasily over his mouthful of numbers while Dean wore the tight accommodating smile he got sometimes when Dad was gone. Now it would be closer to trying to count stars. Plus, it isn't as if Dean would let him anymore. Sam's mouth contorts into a smile.

If Sam presses his knees to bruising against the glove box and cranes his head back, he can barely make out the distant glimmer of stars against the dripping ink sky.

Dean doesn't sing as Zeppelin comes on, teeth gritted as he drives with ferocious purpose. Doesn't sing, doesn't talk, and Sam knows how to read Dean's silences.

The music can't be loud enough to cover Dean's lack.

* * *

Just as Sam hands over their new fake card, his phone bursts to life. Fumbling for it, he checks on habit that Dean's still waiting for him in the Impala. His brother's there, hiding beneath his sunglasses. Linda's name glows on his screen, like it had all those months ago. What's left of Sam's stomach curls protectively into a tight knot. "Hello?" But he can't hear her at first over the crackling litany in the background.

"It's Kevin," she gasps, voice tinny. "He's—uncontrollable. I need help."

A desperate admission that costs her. Something crashes in the electrical storm. His grip on the phone is tight enough the plastic whines as Sam snatches back the credit card. "We're a few hours out. Find salt and a closet. Don't come out. No matter what he says."

The line goes dead. Sam runs to his brother without telling the manager anything. "We have to get back to the bunker." He sounds like Dad. "It's Kevin."

Dean's expression shutters blank over the beginning of a snarly grimace. They peel out of the parking lot fast enough to leave dark lines, fast enough Sam can smell the tires. He dials Linda again. It rings straight through to voicemail, so he calls Jody instead. "Sam?" surprise bright in her tone. "What do you need?"

In the background, Alex groans theatrically at his name, and Sam sinks down into his seat as far as his Sasquatch legs will let him. It was easier when he was fourteen; he'd slide down in the backseat as if the leather could gobble him up like a monster. Sometimes, it even seemed to work—Dad and Dean would act like they couldn't see or hear Sam for hundreds of miles at a time.

"There's a hunt. Dean and I were going to take care of it, but something came up. I'll send you the news reports and everything. We think it's a were, but-"

Jody stops him that easy way she always does. "I'll take care of it. Just shoot me that email, and call me on the flip-side. Got it?"

A frustrated disgusted shout: "You just got back! I thought you said you weren't going to hunt on your own again. You were gonna wait for Donna to—"

Jody tells him, "We'll talk later, Sam." Then she cuts the line.

Sometimes, it might be easier if the Impala really could devour what's left of Sam. He hangs onto his phone. Dean doesn't say anything, just cranks up the music, and doesn't sing. And the car shrieks down the road.

* * *

Dean invades the bunker with a Kevin-banishing fire-poker. To find it silent, with a snow dusting of torn papers and books. "Mrs. Tran?" Sam calls, shotgun ready. "Kevin?"

The papers crinkle as Sam steps over them, confetti small enough Linda won't be able to tape lovingly over the tears. Sam waits for his breath to freeze, but it stays heavy and wet. Dean keeps his grip on the poker, nodding his head toward Linda's room so Sam creeps where his brother directs. When he yanks the door open, her blankets have been ripped off the bed like band-aids, but it's neat otherwise. No blood. "Mrs. Tran?" he calls.

Her closet door swings open to reveal Linda behind a thick barricade of salt. She trembles with the canister in her hand. "Sam? Have you found him?"

"Are you hurt?" Sam lowers the gun.

"No. He didn't hurt me," she sets the salt aside then steps over her ring. There are dark circles under her eyes and age scoured into her face, but no bruises except the ones Sam left.

She blinks at her room like it might swallow her whole.

Sam puts a hand to her shoulder, feels her quake beneath his touch. "When did you last hear him?" asks Sam, his voice scared-animal soothing.

Linda permits his touch, takes a half-a-step closer before she recalls her strength. "A few hours ago. Or close enough. I lost track of time, hiding in there." She recoils at the sheen of his shotgun as she notices it. "You're not planning to shoot him, are you?"

"Not unless I have to," he tells her with his best consolation prize smile, while his grip on the gun goes white-knuckled and he removes his other hand from Linda.

Dean rushes into the room. "You two seen him?" Without asking after Mrs. Tran. He twirls the poker in his hand, slicing through warm air instead of through Kevin.

Maybe Dean'll get payback for the fight last night.

"No." Sam shakes his head, watching Dean's poker. "Mrs. Tran says she hasn't heard anything for a few hours."

Linda cuts in, "We have to find him."

"You need to get back in the closet. Now. He's dangerous, like a rabid dog. We warned you, and now here we are. You're damn lucky he didn't kill you." Dean stops swinging the weapon long enough to glare at her.

"I won't," Linda matches his gaze. "I need to speak with my son." But she keeps shaking.

It's unnerving to watch the person you love more than anything devolve into bursting madness.

Sam blows out all the air in his lungs, deflating like a caved-in carcass on the road. "He might be out of juice. It's possible he won't be able to talk."

Dean advances on Linda like he advanced on Kevin. "We need to burn that ring, Mrs. Tran. You gotta let him go. We all fucking played this game long enough, and it's over. It's gotta be over."

"I will speak with him." She reaches and lifts the poker off Dean with a quivering hand—Dean shakes as she takes it, but he doesn't beat her with it. Sam's impressed. "I have to."

Sam rests his hand again on her shoulder—she's unsteady beneath his touch. "All right, Mrs. Tran. We'll find him."

But the bunker is quiet except for Dean's heavy, not-getting-his-way tread and the ancient lamps humming merrily along. Linda clasps the poker with both her hands, her eyes sweeping over the wreckage of her son's tantrum. Somewhere in all this is the imprint of the toddler Kevin was not long enough ago. Finally, as the silence swells enough Sam's going to crawl out of the prison of his flesh, he asks, voice roughened, "What set him off?" What did you do, is what he means.

Linda stops mid-step. "My research. He wanted me to stop." Her face crumples up like a page of her notes.

Behind them, Dean scoffs, kicking at a snowdrift of shredded Mother's Love. All the "I Told You So" he seems to need, or that he thinks he'll get away with. Sam sighs, rubbing at his face like he can rub out the worry. "We'll find him," he placates again, burnt out and empty.

But she starts walking again. Which is really all Sam needed.

* * *

Their breath comes as freezing mist as they stare down the door to Sam's room. Sam brushes past Linda to creak open the door, and his shotgun enters the room first. "Kevin?" Linda calls.

The bow lays snapped in the middle of the unharmed room. Kevin is sitting before the capsized cello, but it appears undamaged for now, and Sam's breath seizes in his chest. So stupid to worry about a cello when Kevin could still kill any of Dean. Kevin thumbs over a string. "Sam?" Kevin tilts his head to see Sam, eyes heavy-set and red against his ghost pale face.

"Hey, Kevin," Sam says without releasing the reasoning with ghosts has gone so well for him historically. "Easy. You don't need to—"

"I wanted to. Break it, I mean. I wanted to so bad, like I had to. Sort of like when I had to steal my mom's car and the tablet. But then I broke the bow and I just. I just can't. I can't do this," he says. He plucks at another string, and the note haunts the room.

Linda surges forward before Dean can lay a hand on her. "Kevin?" she drops the poker like an amateur, and Dean lunges for it rather than her.

"Mom?" His eyes open up wide, then he looks back at the cello beneath his hands, "I'm sorry." Softly, barely a whisper.

"I know. I know you are, Kevin. We'll keep going. We'll be okay." Linda reaches for her son with trembling, wanting hands, but Kevin passes empty through her fingers, watching the unscathed cello.

"No, Mom. I can't. I just can't—I can't keep doing this. I can't be this. Dean was right. About me. He was right about me." A bitter pill, one Sam's swallowed enough times to know it never gets easier, the Dean-Was-Right-All-Along Pill. "Mom, I don't want to do this. I almost threw you into a bookcase. I was so mad. Like I could watch myself move, and I thought I was gonna break Sam's cello. Please, Mom. Please. Don't make me. Please don't make me, I can't. Please, Mom. I'm sorry—" almost like a kid who doesn't want to eat their brussel sprouts. But he finally turns his face to his mom, expression twisted and aching, and Sam can see his burnt out sockets beneath this echo of him, and Kevin shakes his head over and over and over.

Linda's drops her hands while her son bows over the cello Sam still can't play, and probably never will since his teacher is fading, slipping away under the fierce protection of his mother. "Kevin, I promised you I would fix this."

"You can't. I can't. You have to go home, Mom. It's time to go home." Kevin's fingers pass through the cello, fingertips trailing through the grain. "I'm sorry," he says, as if he could have spared her this, as if they haven't always been working their way here.

Dean holds out his hand for the ring, a kindness, to spare the killing blow from Linda, but Linda wraps both hands around the ring because she can't hold her son.

"I'll do it," she says, in place of I Love You. Or perhaps in place of an apology she won't give.

Kevin almost smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkling, the great survivalist that lasted to age twenty, ready to go. Sam grins at Kevin, says nothing at all as Dean leaves to find salt and kerosene. Dean gets the honor of watching Kevin burn three times, like burrowing knives in his pulled taut skin.

Mother comes to sit before her son, separated by a cello chasm, and she presses her hands to the gleaming wood. She watches him intently, like he'll beg her to let him stay at any moment, always reaching for her expectations. But Kevin watches her with never-going-to-see-you-again eyes as his mother tears up. In front of her son, though, the tears don't fall.

Sam hangs back in the doorway, his fingers twitching on the trigger, and throat working around caught platitudes.

When Dean flows back into the room, he has a canister of salt. "We're gonna have to melt it down. I got a fire started. You know. When you're ready to go all Frodo on this shit."

Like normal, Dean ignores the cutting sharp look from Sam, while Linda traces fingers over a cello covered in Sam's smeary fingerprints. "Are you ready?" she whispers to her son.

Sharply, "Mom, just do it Please." The last word a rounded afterthought.

But Linda tightens her face and rises, all proud graceful veneer over losing her son again. As she comes to the door where Sam and his brother are, she twists to look back at her son, who is watching her go with wide-child eyes. "Kevin."

"It's okay," he tells her, with that toobright smile.

Sam mimics the smile as Linda gazes up at him. But she continues past him and follows Dean's steps to the bright crackling flames burning clean and cheerful. Dean dumps more salt in, while Linda clutches her ring at the slope of Mount Doom. She breathes wetly, but keeps her shoulders square. Sam isn't sure whose benefit it's for. "I'm sorry," Sam echoes her son.

Linda doesn't respond except to throw the ring into the flames that lick it to nothing.

Far away, the bunker is silent.


	4. Chapter 4

Without Kevin, Sam's progress is measured by his own ear rather than flickering lights. He finds himself glancing through the sweep of his hair for Kevin or Linda, but there's never anyone there. Long, long hours of night stretch with the instrument between his knees, the silky smooth bow clenched between trembling fingers, his Youtube instructors droning on without concept of his progress, and bottles of whiskey he drinks before Dean can findthem.

Dean leans in the doorway one morning, expression far enough away he's probably seeing someone Sam isn't. "You're doing good, little brother." An encouragement that used to make Sammy glow bright enough to light a room.

Now Sam twitches his mouth into a smile, and tersely says, "Thanks," so that Dean will leave.

"I miss him, too," Dean says, watching the steady humming lights. "Anyway. Good luck, Mozart."

Dean goes, while Sam loads another video and tries not to watch his brother's slow-step retreat. They'll need to find a hunt soon. They always need to find a hunt soon.

Sam liberates a sheaf of music from Kevin's again-dusty room; without his mother to tend the shrine it looses the lived-in glamour. The music is one of the only things Linda didn't pack away with her when she returned to Neighbor.

How she still has a life and house there, after all the time she missed, is a mystery Sam doesn't pick apart.

He tries Cello Suite No. 5 in C minor, because it's at the top of the stack Linda left the music in. The song never sounds right against the steady notes of the videos he finds, but he plays till his fingers cramp or the notes blur too badly with unshared drink. Sometimes he considers taking the cello hunting with them, because he obviously needs the practice.

But the cello isn't worth the room in the Impala. He knows that.

* * *

When Linda calls a few weeks after her son's belated trip Upstairs, she asks Sam to help her move some furniture. He takes her up on it, mostly to escape Cas's paternalistic machinations with Claire and Dean's caged-tiger sulk. By habit, Sam checks under the hood of the rental before driving it—no blinking means good to go—and he wonders how Cole is readjusting to being a family man, if someone can fit back into their old mold after the darkness comes bursting into their life.

The drive to Neighbor passes almost as slowly as time passes in Hell. Even the dawn seems crystallized, lingering in pastel-colored glory for so long he wonders if it will ever fade, the clouds stained pink and orange as far across the flat wastes as he can see. Sam glances at the unfilled seat beside him and stares till his eyes water, memory sharp and visceral.

Icy fingers rake through the inside of his skull, twisting in sharp nails, and Sam cranks the music to drown out the gleeful rifling, but he can still smell his brother's sulphur.

* * *

Neighbor is the trim town he remembers, now with a dusting of Upper Peninsula snow. Beneath it, the Trans's house's paint flakes off one brittle piece at a time, the garden he remembers barren and unkempt even beneath the press of winter. Outside, a tiny moving van sits patiently beneath the snow.

Linda opens the door for Sam, her eyes red and tired, and he wonders what her nightmares are. Maybe he could guess. "Morning," he says, as she permits him inside.

He passes over the salt line without trouble, to see stacks of boxes labeled in sharpie. Kevin's schoolwork. Kitchen. Pictures. Misc. Sam swallows thickly as Linda brings him a steaming mug of coffee.

Apart from the boxes, only a couch, an armchair, two end tables, and two beds remain. "This everything?" asks Sam, over the rim of his mug.

"Yes." She casts a half-hearted glance over her gutted living room. "Some of Kevin's old friends came by yesterday for some of the furniture. They're getting an apartment and…" she sighs, shaking her head as if it can banish the already banished specter. "They're good kids." The words all hollowed out.

Sam matches her not-smile. "So, where are you headed?"

"My husband's sister lives in Eugene, Oregon. I found a place in Leaburg."

Sam can guess why she's not living with her sister-in-law, but maybe being near some family will help her. As much as anything can. He drains his coffee. "So you want the furniture in the truck?"

"Yes. Let's get to it, then."

She helps him move the furniture, her arms shaking under the weight of the lived-in relics, but she never complains and Sam shoulders as much of it as he can.

"Thanks," she tells him after, surveying the emptied house. "Before you go, I have something for you."

"I don't—" he stops when she emerges from the hall closet with a shiny cello case. His heart beats in his throat so fast he struggles to swallow around it. Sam half-reaches for it before he stalls. "Was that Kevin's?"

"I don't want to see it anymore. Keep it, pawn it. I don't care. Just take it." She pushes it toward him, and he grabs it to keep it from falling. Linda turns and finds another box labeled Kevin's music, while Sam traces his fingers over the case.

"Thank you," he manages. "Uh. Call if you need anything. Don't—don't try and bring him back. It won't work out the way you think it will. Trust me."

"I tried. I couldn't find anything, even with all those—all those books. It was nice to see you, Sam. I appreciate your help." She looks at the door so he can't misunderstand, and he snaps his mouth shut, because whatever she chooses to do, he can't stop her. There are worse things than death, but people always have to find that out for themselves. Or, at least, Dean and Sam did.

He can't imagine Linda giving up, even as he clutches the cello and the box; he is a scavenger pecking through the carcass of the life the Tran family built. Sam feels her gaze on his back as he leaves, no goodbye or fond memories. He does her the courtesy of not flinging an apology back at her.

* * *

That night in his one-queen motel room, Sam frees the gleaming cello from its case. He can smell the recent polish, and he thumbs a string. The sound it makes is almost exactly like the bunker's cello, without any extra magic from belonging to Kevin. Sam coats the bow with resin, then settles into position with his breath caught behind his teeth.

He expects to feel Kevin in the scale he plays; he expects to find Kevin in the warmth of the cello, in the clutch of his hands; he expects to hear the curl of Kevin's laugh when he hits a bad note. Instead, the cello plays in his hands like a cello.

Sam curls around the instrument protectively, curls in on himself, and he doesn't cry—but he throws the bow onto the bed.

Despite googling the nearest pawn shop, Sam stashes the case in the trunk like a corpse.


End file.
